Ben_West

Interim Managing Director @ CEA
13094 karmaJoined Sep 2014Working (15+ years)Panama City, Panama
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Bio

Non-EA interests include chess and TikTok (@benthamite). We are probably hiring: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers

How others can help me

Feedback always appreciated; feel free to email/DM me or use this link if you prefer to be anonymous.

Sequences
3

AI Pause Debate Week
EA Hiring
EA Retention

Comments
967

Topic contributions
6

Thanks for writing and sharing this Alexander – I thought it was an unusually helpful and transparent post.

Thanks for doing this! Very interesting.

Would it be possible to stratify the results (particularly the satisfaction and "reasons for dissatisfaction") by engagement level?

Possibly the sample size isn't large enough to do this, but it would be interesting to see, if possible.

Are there statements or predictions which you believe have been falsified by recent events because of these four points? 

The things you are saying all sound to me like things people would have agreed with in 2015. The oldest EA-ish post I can find about OAI specifically concludes that the author is distrustful of Sam (though not for the reasons you state). This 2017 post says:

I’ve talked with a lot of people about this in the AI risk community, and they’ve often attempted to steelman the case for OpenAI, but I haven’t found anyone willing to claim, as their own opinion, that OpenAI as conceived was a good idea.

Prominent safety-oriented people have left OAI (Paul Christiano, Dario Amodei, etc.), which maybe could be interpreted as them having been mistaken about what to expect at OAI, but I'm not sure to what extent the four points you listed above were causal in their decisions.

It feels to more to me like people were aware that their priorities differed from OAI's, but thought it was still net positive to work there. And I'm not sure that any of them actually disagree with that take now? I'd be interested to hear comments from those more knowledgeable than me.

I think the tweet is referring to political appointments. I think the tweet is implying that the position must not be extremely influential, because the most influential positions are politically appointed. (And, if this were a political appointment, we would know about it because of various disclosure requirements for those positions.)

Unrepresentative of what? At least in my University ethics courses we spent way more time arguing about the rights of anencephalic children or human fetuses than insects. (And I would guess that neuron count explains a large fraction of the variance in experience between adult and fetal humans, for example.)

In any case: I think most people's moral intuitions are terrible and you shouldn't learn a ton from the fact that people disagree with you. But as a purely descriptive matter, there are plenty of people who disagree with you – so much so that reading their arguments is a standard part of bioethics 101 in the US.

Yeah, I am not sure how to treat meta. In addition to funders, Charity Entrepreneurship probably gets substantial credit for SWP, etc.

It indeed strikes me as a quite trivial philosophical assumption the denial of which would I think seem absurd to almost anyone considering it

On the contrary, approximately everyone denies this! Approximately ~0% of Americans think that humans with more neurons than other humans have more moral value, for example.[1] 

  1. ^

    Citation needed, but I would be pretty surprised if this were false. Would love to hear contrary evidence though!

That's fair. I personally like that this forces people to come to terms with the fact that interventions targeted at small animals are way more scalable than those targeted at larger ones. People might decide on some moral weights which cancel out the scale of small animal work, but that's a nontrivial philosophical assumption, and I like prompting people to think about whether it's actually reasonable.  

EA Three Comma Club

I'm interested in EA organizations that can plausibly be said to have improved the lives of over a billion individuals. Ones I'm currently aware of:

  1. Shrimp Welfare Project – they provide this Guesstimate, which has a mean estimate of 1.2B shrimps per year affected by welfare improvements that they have pushed
  2. Aquatic Life Institute – they provide this spreadsheet, though I agree with Bella that it's not clear where some of the numbers are coming from.

Are there any others?

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